The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

Lolo’s eyes danced with joy when I engaged him. African eyes as compared with others, besides being remarkable organs of sight, serve a great variety of secondary uses. They can laugh, or sing, or plead, or weep; they can love, or they can break all the commandments. But the most beautiful and expressive eyes in Africa are those of the boys. Lolo at once regarded this new relationship as a kind of fatherhood on my part; and he amply repaid me, not only in faithful service, but also in personal devotion which was quite pathetic, and which in the course of events was put to an extreme test. He was both brave and affectionate—a typical African boy.

On my part, it was my knowledge of Lolo that first inspired me with a strong desire for a school, and enabled me to realize what a moral factor a school of such boys might become in transforming the life of the people. The African baby is a beautiful, solemn-eyed little creature, who looks out at the world as if he were undecided whether to stay. About half of them decide not to stay. The African baby is cunning and bright, but it seldom cries, and it is not given to play nearly as much as the white child. As the child grows older he cheers up. It has been said that only when he reaches years of indiscretion does the African become joyful. From that time on he is joyful to the end. But the African boy, before he becomes stupidly happy, bears the strongest stamp of humanity and is more interesting than at any other stage in his career.

On the first long march into the forest, Lolo easily kept up with the caravan and when we arrived in camp busied himself in waiting upon “his white man”—opening my box of clothing and getting everything that I wanted, taking off my shoes, bringing water, making my bed, helping the cook, waiting at supper and a score of other duties. On the first day of this journey we passed through Lolo’s town, about two or three hours from the coast. The chief was Lolo’s own father and there was some likelihood of trouble; for the boy had slipped away without his father’s knowledge. Lolo hid in the bush while I sat down in the palaver-house and called for the chief, thinking it best to tell him that I had employed his boy and in some way to win his consent. He kept me waiting an unusually long time. But when he appeared no explanation was necessary; it was evident that he had been making his toilet. He was dressed in a pink calico Mother Hubbard, which came about to his knees and was longer in front than behind. I thought he had it on wrong side to the front, but I was not sure. It was the more incongruous because he was very tall and strongly built. He was so preoccupied with this new robe of state that it was the easiest thing in the world for him to part with a son; and there was no need of a present, nor even of diplomacy. During my first term in Africa, a year and a half, Lolo was with me all the time.

He had been with me a whole month, and I had about concluded that I had ensnared an angel, when one day I discovered in him a large inheritance of latent savagery. There was another boy at Efulen about the same age as Lolo. They used the same bucket to fetch water. A dispute arose as to who should have the bucket first. The dispute developed by rapid stages into a quarrel, and then a fight. An extreme unwillingness to part with the bucket was followed by excessive willingness; and when I came in sight, they were passing it back and forth to each other with deplorable vivacity, which threatened to put the bucket out of service for all time. But their savage yells and distortions of countenance were so amazing and impressive that the flying bucket was reduced to an insignificant detail. As I approached they closed in upon each other, then fell to the ground each with his arms tight around the other’s neck and intent upon nothing short of murder. Having rolled over several times, they came to the edge of a very steep hill that had been cleared for a road. Down this hill they rolled together at such a rate that they continued to cling to each other for safety and because there was nothing else to cling to. They received so many jolts and bruises on the way that about the time they reached the bottom, or soon after, a bond of sympathy united them and they were friends.

Shortly afterwards I fell sick with a fever and lay in bed several weeks, first in a tent and then in a native hut. It was through those long, weary weeks that I fully tested the patience and the devotion of Lolo, and the little servant of the jungles became a friend whom I shall never forget. As I grew worse the people when approaching had to be warned not to make a noise, and warned again after their arrival, and warned once a minute while they remained. When Lolo was not doing this or engaged in some other urgent service he was sitting beside my bed, sometimes keeping cold water on my head, or fanning me, and if no immediate service was necessary he still sat there so as to be on hand when I required him. There was nothing to look at but bark walls and an earthen floor and he could not even see those very well, for empty salt-bags had been hung over the windows to darken the room. I marvelled at his devotion, which I had done nothing in the world to earn, except that I was fond of him. It was no sense of duty that impelled him, nor any moral obligation—the African is not strong on morals—but it was purely a service of love, and it would have done credit to any white friend. Often when he thought I was asleep I felt his hand laid on my forehead to see if the fever was high. Often, indeed, the little African boy in the service of the white man regards him with an abandoned devotion peculiar to his race, and with a love which his own father has never awakened, although there is bound up with it all the moral possibilities of the boy.

After leaving Kamerun I still kept track of Lolo. Others followed me who were at least as good to him as I was; and it is a great satisfaction to know that he did not grow up into a savage. And yet of such stuff are savages made. Hamlet, in the churchyard, reflecting sadly upon the base uses to which our bodies may return, observes that imagination may trace the noble dust of Alexander till one finds it stopping a bung-hole; and that “Imperius Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, May stop a hole to keep the wind away.” It is a matter for at least as grave reflection that out of the same living boy may be made the bloodthirsty savage, or the kind of man which is called “the noblest work of God.” Which of the two a boy is destined to become depends somewhat on whether his name happens to be Lolo, or John.

It was years after that I opened, at Baraka, in the French Congo, a boarding-school for Fang boys. At the beginning of the term I gathered the boys and brought them to Baraka with the Dorothy. The mountain does not come to Mahomet, so Mahomet goes and fetches it. As they were scattered over the entire area of the great Fang field, the opening of the school was a formidable labour of two weeks; and it was also the most exhausting and trying experience of the whole year. For these two weeks were spent not in actual travel, but nearly all of it in the towns in red-hot contentions with the parents of the boys, who at the first were always unwilling to let them come to the school. In the more remote towns many of them suspected that I wanted to sell the boys into slavery, or even to kill them for some unknown purpose. There were days, before the school was well known, when I was utterly disheartened by their continual refusal, in town after town, to let me have their boys, though there were many bright lads in most of the towns.

The boys themselves would have come; the trouble was with their parents. Sometimes I was constrained to say that the parental institution was an intolerable nuisance; or, at least, that the African child might well envy the blessed Melchizedek who was without father or mother. But orphans are not to be found. Each child has a score of parents; for a child’s parents include all his uncles and aunts even several degrees removed. The child of course knows his own parents and makes a difference between them and the rest; but he addresses them all as “Father” or “Mother,” and they divide parental authority among them, all taking a hand in the child’s bringing-up: and it must be admitted that no better way could be devised for bringing up a first-class savage.

I usually held a service in the town. Then I asked the people for boys for my school, explaining the purpose of the school. The first reply was always a loud general consent—which did not deceive me; for I knew that it was only general and did not apply to any particular boy. As soon as a boy jumps up and says, “I want to go,” immediately several fathers and a score of mothers order him to sit down; another boy expresses his desire to come, and another score of parents protest. Then the war is on; and during its progress I usually receive a goodly share of cursing and abuse. With some I argue, with some I plead; sometimes I flatter, sometimes I scold—anything to get the boy. Besides diplomacy, a present of a piece of laundry soap was a necessity. I carried the yellowest kind of it, in long bars which I cut off by the inch.

I would not take any boy, whom I had not had before, without his parents’ consent. And if I failed to obtain their consent, however unreasonable they might be, I declined to take the boy, though I often left him crying on the bank, or sometimes fighting a whole mob of his numerous relations single-handed. But if the boy had been in my school before and I had expended months of labour upon him the question was quite different. I then felt that I had a claim upon him, and I would take him if I possibly could, even in spite of his parents.